Continuous discovery = continuous learning

Continuous discovery means continuous learning

Most product teams realize they need to learn about customers and their problems. They may not all realize (yet) the benefits of spreading that discovery throughout the entire process of building their product. Continuous discovery provides a way for your team to learn about your customer and their problems so you can acquire the information that you need when you need it.

Meanwhile, in product news, we’re talking about an Apple monopoly, AI spam, and new products that help you map customer journeys and hum that tune.

What is Continuous Discovery? The folks at the Interaction Design Foundation describe continuous discovery as an approach to user research used in agile teams where research is conducted as small, frequent activities throughout the product development lifecycle. This infuses customer feedback into all product decisions instead of focusing on one-time research activity at the beginning of a project.

Continuous discovery – holy grail, or poisoned chalice? Continuous discovery sounds brilliant in theory. How can speaking to users every week possibly not be a good thing for Agile teams to do? However, in practice, continuous discovery can cause teams more harm than good if they don’t approach it correctly. Neil Turner explains what continuous discovery is, what some of the common pitfalls are, and how teams can avoid them.

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This Week’s Video

Product Experimentation at Scale w/ Claire Vo

Becoming a Successful Continuous Discovery Team. More teams are moving toward a truly cross-functional product team model where the teams that develop the product (i.e., product manager, designers, software engineers) are responsible for their own discovery. They do user research, conduct experiments, and synthesize what they learn weekly to support their daily product decisions. In this talk from INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk, introduces continuous discovery and explains why it can be useful and how to implement it.

This video and many others like it are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub, you can join the community today for free.

Meeting Your Customers Where They Are

The mantra "meet your customers where they are" takes on a literal meaning in the practice of continuous discovery. A recent episode of Kellogg Insight's podcast, "Need Product Inspiration? Meet Your Customers in the Wild," narrated by Laura Pavin and featuring insights from Gina Fong, a clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg, delves into this concept with compelling narratives that highlight the transformative power of consumer ethnography.

Gina Fong's recounting of her early career days, witnessing an elderly woman struggling to connect her digital camera to a printer, is a striking testament to the invaluable insights from direct observation. This scenario, which led to the innovation of wireless printers with more accessible peripheral inputs, underscores the essence of continuous discovery: the ability to unearth latent needs through empathy and keen observation.

Fong's venture into consumer anthropology further exemplifies this approach. Tasked with understanding pet owners' deep connections with their pets, she embarked on a journey that transcended her initial reservations, uncovering the profound impact pets have on their owners' lives. This deep dive into the consumers' world informed product development and cultivated a habitual curiosity in Fong, an attribute indispensable for product leaders.

I won’t give everything away – but it’s worth a listen for those of you product people out there looking for a bit of inspiration as you want to feed your desire to learn from customers. For product managers and product leaders, the episode serves as a compelling narrative on the power of continuous discovery. It challenges us to go beyond conventional data analysis and intimately engage with our consumers' lives. By adopting a beginner's mindset and embracing curiosity without judgment, we can uncover the nuanced needs and desires that drive consumer behavior, enabling us to design products and experiences that truly resonate.

So, ask yourself this – how can you meet your customers where they are and learn from them?

According to the DOJ, building your own platform makes you a monopoly. The U.S. Department of Justice announced it filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of behaving like a monopoly in locking in iPhone customers and limiting competitors building hardware and software. The lawsuit is a wide-ranging and complicated affair, and TechCrunch covered the ins and outs of the DOJ’s case, the industry’s response, and all the ongoing implications for companies and customers.

I’ll have the Spam, Spam, AI, and Spam. TechCrunch found the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch when it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. An example is a GPT that promises to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties but serves as little more than a funnel to third-party paid services and advertises themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

It’s not the destination; it’s the (customer) journey. SaaS journey management platform TheyDo lets everyone on your team collaborate to map customer journeys. You can use it to map user journeys, OKRs, and customer journeys to bring insights and data together. When your team can collaborate to map a journey, you make it that much easier for everyone to build a shared understanding of how customers experience your product.

YouTube can name that tune in three hums. YouTube Music has rolled out song search, a feature that lets you search for a song by playing, singing, or humming a few bars. The true benefit of this product is when you’re playing an ultra-competitive round of music bingo and can’t quite place that Taylor Swift song.

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The New York Product Conference (a Product Collective/INDUSTRY event) returns to the Times Center in Manhattan on April 18th for a packed day of:

Keynote talks on product leadership, AI, product positioning, and more.
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Small group discussions, networking, an end-of-day reception, and more!

BONUS: Purchase a Plus Pass or Superpass, and get access to a half-day workshop on April 17th (Influencing Without Authority) and/or access to online training programs.

How teams do continuous discovery research today, according to research. Recent research conducted by User Interviews’s internal UX research team revealed the rising popularity of the continuous discovery approach to doing UX research, the folks at User Interviews wanted to learn more. Lizzy Burnam shared how User Interviews researched continuous discovery and the key insights they drew from it.

From Ideas to Breakthroughs: How Continuous Discovery Powers Digital Healthcare Innovation. Digital healthcare products have been notorious for their suboptimal UX owing to their complexity, the demands of industry standards, cascading dependencies, the expected resistance to change, and HIPPA. Renuka Savant describes how healthcare product leaders can embrace a continuous discovery process and infuse it into their product strategy.